Setting up my infrastructure – Part 3: Bug tracker requirements

In my last blog post I explained why I want to automate as much as possible. For this I want a build server. The next thing that’s really important to me is, to log every issue and idea I have and have myself organized through the project.

For that I’m going to evaluate some tools, and before you start with downloading and installing all sort of tools and testing them, you should know what you’re looking for.

Easy input of tasks / bugs / features / ideasI don’t want to spend a lot of time on ‘managing’ my task manager, and I certainly don’t want to overmanage myself.

Work log / spend time trackingEven though it’s a pet project, I’d like to see how much time a certain feature has cost. Additionally, if I can see my estimates vs. reality, and I log the reasons why I needed less/more time, I can improve my estimates.

Change logs / Release Notes reportI’d love to be able to generate my release notes out of the tasks that have been fixed for a certain release, so I have to maintain this information only in a single place. Like in an additional field of the task, where I just enter the information that should be visible in the release notes.

DocumentationNot necessarily required in the Bug tracker, but if I can note some technical details (i.e. in custom fields), then I know where to look for the information to build up the real project’s documentation.

Integration with VCS / Build serverIn a perfect world I would be able to see the related task(s) from a commit, the related commits from a task, the builds within the build server affected by those commits and the other way round: I would be able to open the corresponding tasks directly from the build in the build server.

An easy API

If that tool would support a little bit of analysis / reporting, that’d be totally great. I already mentioned the release notes generation above, but also time spent on features vs. bugs would be an interesting figure for my project. The last bullet point would hopefully make up for all the things that I would like, but that are not supported out of the box. Nevertheless, I actually don’t want to lock me in a specific tool, so writing custom stuff for a single solution would only be that last option, since that time is definetly lost when switching tools.

In the next post I want to share my thoughts on what a ci / build server should be capable of, before we want to start with the real evaluation.